The COVID-19 pandemic may have forced your institution to delay (or freeze) hiring for the near future for open administrative, staff, or even faculty positions. In these times, you are likely, by necessity, to be carefully considering the academic personnel needs at your college or university.

And academic leaders everywhere are assessing how best to handle remote hiring (or other selective academic personnel decisions)—in a time when meeting in person, or even using campus hardware, is not possible.

Luckily, since long before COVID-19 happened, Interfolio has been helping colleges and universities to achieve a digital transformation around their academic hiring and data gathering. (Get a demo of the platform here.)

Here, we discuss a few essential guidelines your office should follow when considering a move to online academic recruitment, fellowships, and other competitive processes in higher education. 

The guidelines are:

1. Ease for committees/reviewers is essential
2. It’s best to compile data reporting needs and priorities in advance 
3. Letters of recommendation should be automated

Guideline 1: Ease of reviewing materials is essential

The practical experience of evaluating many applications in a row is an absolutely central aspect of academic recruitment to bear in mind.

Yet, oddly, this is a basic need that can slip out of sight during your digital transformation, amidst conversations with IT, HR, provost and dean’s offices, and the institutional diversity office. Don’t let it!

The page-by-page application review experience will make or break your transition to online faculty hiring. (Just ask Millikin University or Notre Dame.)

Regardless of whether a decision is made by committee or by a simpler administrative review, academic applications are much larger and complicated than the applications for most staff positions. They have many pages, many different kinds of documents, and in many fields, images and multimedia.

As you undertake a digital transformation around selective processes, you must keep sight of the people evaluating the applications. Ask yourself: “How will they reach good decisions under this online hiring model?”

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Guideline 2: It’s best to compile data reporting needs and priorities in advance

In parallel to the goal of actually handling the search and decision process around academic hiring, you will want visibility into a variety of data points after the fact.

It is critical to compile your list of desired data points, beginning early on in your digital transformation effort. Have at least a brief check-in with your institutional diversity, HR, and institutional research offices to make sure you have your bases covered.

Here are a few sample data points around academic hiring that you should consider:

• Self-reported diversity/demographic information (following federal EEO Commission guidelines)
• Quantitative ranking of applicants by reviewers, based on standard criteria
• Other applicant profile information:
  • Highest degree earned; date earned; granting institution
  • Country and state of residence
• Dates:
  • Position open and close
  • Submission per application
• Withdrawn applications
• Other data on positions offered
  • Rank
  • Title
  • Tenure-track or not
  • Full-time or part-time
• Disposition code (i.e. “Why was this applicant or group of applicants removed from consideration?”)

Keeping this checklist at hand during your digital transformation will help you make sure that, in your new online academic hiring model, you’re able to capture and view all this information later.

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Guideline 3: Letters of recommendation should be automated

Handling confidential letters of recommendation, in an efficient and responsible way, is one of the biggest burdens on administrative time around academic hiring.

In 2020, you do not have to settle for a manual process around recommendation letters in higher education. You should see this as a given in your digital transformation.

This is because letters are a specific bottleneck that make a big difference in the overall flow of recruitment and competitive selection at your college or university. Of course, it is up to the committee, department or institution (not Interfolio) to decide where recommendation letters should fall in the process.

You should expect your automated solution will accommodate all of the following:

• Either the applicant or the committee should be able to request a letter online.
• Intended confidentiality status should be clearly marked prior to letter submission.
  • Once submitted, the letter file should be kept confidential from the applicant before, during, and after submission of the application.
  • Also, it should be possible for the applicant to supply a letter held confidentially via their dossier service.
• The letter should go directly into the proper application (still confidentially). However, the applicant should be able to submit their application even before the letter is submitted.
• The applicant must be reasonably prevented from submitting a letter for themselves (and getting away with it).
• The applicant, the writer, and the institution should receive automatic confirmation when the letter is submitted.

The point is, you should make automating recommendation letters a priority. It will reap big benefits for the efficiency of your process.

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Interested in how a modern online faculty hiring experience might look at your institution? Get a demo of Interfolio here.

Interfolio is committed to helping the global faculty affairs community and academic leadership continue to play their pivotal role throughout these changing circumstances. 

If you have questions about moving higher education operations online or business continuity in these trying times, we welcome inquiries or conversation at team@interfolio.com. 

Across higher education, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown academic affairs and faculty development offices the value of online faculty evaluation systems and personnel processes. 

Obviously, the current circumstances are still forcing a range of very immediate needs to be addressed around the continuity of daily operations at academic institutions. 

However, once immediate continuity needs are somewhat settled, many college and university leaders may now be considering how to achieve a digital transformation around faculty affairs in the longer term. Interfolio has helped many higher education institutions make this transition.

If you are considering how you can successfully and securely manage faculty review workflows online going forward, here are a few early factors to consider:

1. Audit your faculty review types
2. Assess how centralized (or not) your processes are today
3. Assemble the right team

Download our free white paper on evaluating new systems for promotion and tenure:

A Note: Pairing Data with Academic Personnel Decisions

Intentionally, this post focuses on considerations around faculty review, promotion, and tenure workflows—that is, bringing the classic three-ring binder online successfully.

Yet the decision workflow is just one piece of bringing faculty affairs online. Clearly, there is a natural connection between conducting reviews of scholar accomplishments and your institution’s overall handling of faculty activity data. 

You can certainly focus just on what’s needed to get up and running online soon with the formal review processes—many of our clients have done that. 

However, you will see the most far-reaching benefits if you also bring CV information into a devoted faculty data hub. That way, your formal review cases can simply draw upon the existing data and materials in the system. If you’d like to learn more, a great starting point is our free white paper on data in faculty affairs.

Factor 1: Audit your faculty evaluation and review types

Even if your current focus is on complicated, labor-intensive types of faculty evaluations, it would be valuable to consider the broader picture for your future success. 

Before you get too far in your planning, we recommend you make time to list out all the types of academic professional reviews that take place at your institution. Briefly note down which people or offices are involved in each process today. 

Here is a sample list of situations that require formal reviews of scholars’ information and materials:

• Appointment
• Reappointment
• Annual review
• Tenure
• Promotion
• Merit reviews
• Sabbatical and travel leave
• Funding and fellowship applications

Of course, in your list, it is best to use the actual terms that your own institution uses—you should not end up having to change them even when you go digital. 

If you approach the solution as not just “taking tenure online,” but rather start to see all faculty professional review scenarios as online activities—because they can be!—you will get the most mileage out of whatever solution you arrive at.

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Factor 2: Assess how centralized (or decentralized) your processes are today

Almost all colleges and universities have a “master” faculty handbook that governs the universal policies around professional reviews of teaching and research faculty members. 

However, beyond that universal handbook, academic institutions differ widely from one another in terms of such aspects as:

• School-/college-specific requirements
• Discipline-specific materials
• Committee evaluation process
• How involved the candidate is
• How much information needs to be collected

To understand how centralized (or not) your institution is, you may need to draw out high-level flowcharts for each of your major academic units, such as a school, college, or division. 

Sometimes there is much more variation between academic units than anyone at the top assumed. In other cases, faculty reviews are much more similar between units than the faculty affairs director would have guessed. 

The degree of centralization influences the questions you’ll need to answer, including file type requirements, the need for fielded form data versus uploaded documents, and the transparency needed for faculty candidates.

In Interfolio’s work on taking faculty evaluations online at various higher education institutions, we have found that this “mapping” exercise frequently leads to discoveries that have real impact on the digital transformation effort. 

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Factor 3: Assemble the right team

In order to make a successful transition to online faculty professional reviews, you’re going to need to secure buy-in from a lot of people—including faculty, leaders, and staff. In order to do that, you’ll need a core team of champions in the right positions across campus. 

You don’t need to set your entire team in stone from square one. But you will want to have an idea of who could occupy the following roles:

Project leader (visionary). There needs to be at least one person who is really driving the change forward, maintaining a clear sense of where your school needs to move “from” and “to.” The majority of the time, this is someone in faculty affairs or the provost’s/dean’s office who is explicitly tasked with faculty development or tenure. Or someone else, as long as they really believe in the unique needs of faculty reviews. If this topic really speaks to you… you might be this person!

Institutional implementation lead (Power user!). You’ll need someone who has great first-hand familiarity with the processes as they are today. This person makes sure that all the new technical actions and tools truly meet your practical needs. Often this is someone in a manager or coordinator role in the academic leadership offices (faculty affairs, provost, dean), but it may also be someone in the library, HR, or occasionally IT. Regardless, they must relate to the faculty perspective.

Executive sponsor. This person has the visibility and the authority to show the whole institution—when the time comes—that:

• This transition is real
• It matters and is really worth it
• We are doing it

Often, this is the provost or an associate provost. Identifying and recruiting a strong executive sponsor early on in this process is absolutely essential for faculty, staff, and peer administrators to ultimately embrace the transition.

Institutional technical lead. This is someone in IT who has the familiarity and the authority to ask the right questions and solve potential technical roadblocks. They need not be the CIO/CTO, but they must realize the value of making the change to online faculty reviews and activity data.

Ultimately, other people will get involved. But, as one Interfolio trainer at a major public research university told us: “Start the process as early as possible. I really don’t think it’s too soon to communicate and get out there the idea that change is coming.”

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Thinking about online faculty reviews, data, or appointment management next year? Start with our free white paper on evaluating promotion and tenure systems, and contact us soon with any questions.

View our other COVID-19 resources for faculty and higher ed.

If you are involved in the faculty hiring process in higher education—whether at the department, college, or university level—and you are preparing to move that process online in the wake of COVID-19, here are a few pointers to help it succeed in the short term.

First, we want to acknowledge that it is a challenging time for everyone, which no one could have been fully prepared for. 

Here, our advice is focused more on navigating an unanticipated (but necessary) shift to online faculty hiring this spring. 

And to be most practical, we are really speaking of active hires that may be going on right now—not searches so far out that you might postpone them altogether.

We will note, however, that COVID-19 is hardly the first time that colleges and universities have needed to seek an effective online method for academic recruitment. Interfolio has helped hundreds of academic institutions of all sizes and types move their faculty hiring online in the short and the long term. 

The tips are:

1. Enforce a single online storage location
2. If you are still accepting applications, ask for PDFs 
3. Consider pausing recommendations until really needed (unless already automated)
4. Establish explicit criteria and collect quantitative ratings

But first: what is success?

When we say “make it successful,” we are talking not just about reaching any hiring decision, and making some offer that is accepted.

Even if you are moving to a new online hiring process that’s unfamiliar to your committees and staff, the integrity, inclusivity, and care of your academic recruitment practices do not have to be compromised.

Whether tenure-track or not, your faculty members are the engine of the academic mission. You want to get faculty hiring right.

Tip 1: Enforce a single online storage location as the only system for this spring’s searches

You want to get organized from this point on, so that you don’t make last-minute discoveries of missing application materials or skipped steps that delay the closing out of a search. 

(This was a significant factor in our work with San Diego State University and The University of Texas at Austin, among many others.)

Whatever system you choose in the short term—whether it’s a technology specifically meant for faculty hiring, or an HR or applicant tracking system, or a free file-sharing system—someone should set aside time to get all applications you have already received into it. Create an organized folder structure. 

If you allow application materials for the same search to remain stored across multiple locations (or even for multiple searches in, say, the same academic division), you actually will spend a lot more time, between now and the end of the search, retrieving documents. 

Whatever up-front time it requires to pull applications into a single location is going to save you more time in the remainder of the searches.

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Tip 2: If you are still accepting applications, update language to require PDF format for all text documents

This is just an easy thing you can do to (hopefully) reduce file type issues, especially for your department staff. Trying to get files to open, convert, or “Save As” eats up a surprising amount of time in the preparation of files for the committee to review. 

As a favor to applicants (and to lower the bar so everyone will do this), consider even linking out to a set of common PDF conversion instructions, as part of your faculty job posting. Your IT office might have one.

To be sure, disciplines that rely heavily on multimedia, such as arts, architecture, and computer science, will still be accepting other file types. Those committees may well have their own professional opinions about which file types are the best practice for their field.

But when it comes to any text documents such as CVs, publications, personal statements, teaching evaluations, and confidential letters of recommendation, PDF is the way to go.

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Tip 3: If confidential recommendation letters aren’t automated already, just pause them until actively needed

The practice of soliciting confidential letters of recommendation is, of course, widely regarded as invaluable to hiring new faculty members that you feel confident about.

However, handling letters of recommendation in an efficient and responsible way is one of the biggest sources of administrative time around faculty hiring for a college or university.

Depending upon where your open positions are at the moment, ask yourself: “What is the latest possible stage in the hiring process where we could require recommendation letters and still meaningfully incorporate them into the decision process?”

If your department or committee does not already have in place, today, a streamlined mechanism for:

• requesting the letters,
• receiving them,
• verifying them,
• confirming to the sender and the applicant that you got them,
• adding them into the application,
• and distributing them to the members of the committee…

… this is one area likely to eat up a lot of logistical time in the coming weeks.

The smaller the pool for which you require letters, the more feasible that coordination is going to be for your staff.

There continues to be abundant healthy debate in higher education about the right way for academic hiring committees to incorporate confidential recommendation letters—in a way that is both valuable for the decision process and humane to the candidates (who are likely applying to many, many positions). 

That’s for the academic community to work out. All we can tell you is, for our many institutions that we’ve worked with for hiring (and the many that are regularly joining), confidential letters are a major pain point, and a big relief when automated or reduced.

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Tip 4: Establish explicit criteria and collect quantitative ratings (alongside qualitative feedback)

Established criteria and a standardized rating system are common enough that your committee or institution may already have a precedent in place. 

When it comes to your committee reaching a good decision in a timely fashion, and reducing the role of implicit bias in that decision, it is a best practice to introduce a standard rating on criteria. (See, for example, Columbia University’s Guide to Best Practices in Faculty Search and Hiring, p. 19.)

Your committee should agree on what the criteria for all applicants should be—for a really basic example, this might be “Teaching,” “Research,” “Service,” and something like, “Professional Growth.” And, if you can manage it, consider writing down some examples for all committees of what you expect to earn a “lowest,” “middle,” and “highest” ranking. 

Then require each committee member to score each applicant with a ranking on each criterion. 

Of course this is not the only or most important aspect of any application. But it is a point of reference to clarify who the real contenders are, and keep the committee focused on the final outcome, which is: “Which of these candidates, if any, will we hire this spring?”

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Interfolio is committed to helping the global faculty affairs community and academic leadership continue to play their pivotal role throughout these changing circumstances. 

If you have questions about moving higher education operations online or business continuity in these trying times, we welcome inquiries or conversation at team@interfolio.com. 

COVID-19 has created a new set of challenges for higher education institutions, including a need to handle faculty professional reviews online. But COVID-19 is not the first time colleges and universities have seen a need to move their faculty advancement workflows online. Interfolio has helped many academic institutions of all sizes and types make this transition. 

If you are involved in faculty reviews as a committee member or chair, staff member, or in an administrative position, here are a few guiding points to successfully conduct these processes online.

The three critical steps you should consider at this stage are:

1. Use the cloud!
2. Map out access restrictions for current cases
3. Provide final reviewers (e.g. provost) with a list of remaining cases/statuses

Step 1: Use the cloud!

Our first tip is really a dutiful reminder, because it is so important: back up everything important online. Hopefully your institution’s IT office is vocal about this.

When you first start to move processes online that previously took place on paper and in person (or even if digital files were stored on someone’s individual computer), it’s very easy to be inconsistent about backup and documentation habits.

But in a scenario where you are handling sensitive information like the professional reviews of faculty members (or any employees, of course), you must establish a practice by which electronic records are made in the first place, and then are backed up online.

Make sure that the materials, data, and metadata involved in these decisions are systematically and routinely captured via a secure cloud platform. It is the way of modern organizations.

Many of your higher education peers have successfully navigated this transition, and we are here to be a resource. But we will note that a failure to adequately document both A) that candidate and committee data was stored securely, and B) that an institutional process was followed, is at the heart of one of our oft-downloaded research pieces, Equity and Legal Risk in Tenure Review. 

Especially for your short-term needs, this is very solvable with modern technology. 

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Step 2: Map out access restrictions for current cases (remaining steps)

It’s mid-March. In your faculty review cases of various kinds, what official steps remain? Is that clearly written down somewhere?

At Interfolio, we talk a lot about planning for sustainable, repeatable, templatized processes. We have various white papers about it. Noble goal! 

But let’s set the long-term aside for the moment.

Consider blocking off an hour, either by yourself (if you are the faculty dossier manager) or with your colleagues who are generally familiar with different review schedules, to sit down and map out each official step remaining in the faculty personnel processes for this academic year. 

If you’re not using a system that maps this out automatically, go ahead and draw it on paper, in a basic Powerpoint slide, or Word document.

The purpose of this exercise is to prevent extra delays, or accidental violations of process, between now and the finish line.

For each step remaining for each type of review, write down: 

• ACCESS: Which individuals must have access to the case materials and information at this step?
• NO ACCESS: Is there anyone who especially must not have access at this step?
• CANDIDATE: What new information or correspondence does the faculty member who is being reviewed need at this step?
• ADDITIONS: What new materials or information (such as a signed or stamped letter) must be added to the case at this step?
• TRANSFER METHOD: When this step is complete, how will the case move to the next step?

In your particular process, maybe there are additional questions that apply at every step. Modify as you need.

In the short term, the amount of work involved in this exercise should be manageable. The heart of this step is to make sure that you’ve thought it out now, so that in two weeks, you don’t have an inconvenient realization.

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Step 3: Provide final reviewers (e.g. provost) with a list of remaining cases/statuses to plan for time-sensitive workload

These processes can bottleneck when there is one committee or individual who needs to put their eyes on each case. 

We know that these challenging times are equally affecting all roles. In addition to those of you who are working in administrative and chair roles to keep the wheels turning, we do sympathize so much with senior academic leaders at higher education institutions under the current circumstances.

To enable those final, top-level entities to prepare for their role in reviewing and signing off on faculty cases, try to compile a list of all the formal academic review cases that are going to need their attention and give it to them well ahead of time. 

On this list, it may help them if you can note:

• (Of course) The faculty member’s name, current appointment(s), and academic division or department
• The type of case—whether it’s tenure, a promotion, an annual or merit review, or a leave request
• The status of the case at the moment, especially which committee it’s currently with

Also, just as a helpful presentation choice, it will help if you list them in some intentional order—either the sequence in which these final reviewers will likely receive them, or perhaps in order of their deadlines (in case that’s different). Or even simply listed by review type.

You probably don’t need to color-code them—unless you have a huge quantity of cases for these final steps. Then consider the highlighter.

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Interfolio is committed to helping the global faculty affairs community and academic leadership continue to play their pivotal role throughout these changing circumstances. 

If you have questions about moving higher education operations online or business continuity in these trying times, we welcome inquiries or conversation at team@interfolio.com.